Archive

Shattering Illusions

We often have a superficial understanding of complex systems, which creates the "illusion of understanding. Time to shatter the illusion.

Explainable AI

"Explainable AI" (xAi) or "explainability" is when you design and build systems that can explain their decisions. Turns out I do this right now.

Thoughts on The Worlds I See

The Worlds I See is a very good story and now I have some thoughts to share.

2024 In Review

2024 was busy and 2025 has been unrelenting so far.

so long, farewell

A farewell message to the greater AST community.

Push vs Pull Work

In a push system, teams are given tasks to do. In a pull system, teams pull tasks from a backlog or central place. By moving towards a pull system our testers will have more ownership and responsibility over their work.

2023 in Review

It’s March and I haven’t published since November. I am just now writing a recap of last year so it’s fair to say I’m a bit behind on things, but I’m excited to share why! Year in Review time. You can find previous years in

Observability, Monitoring and Testing

Observability blurs the line between testing and monitoring. The concept TOAD can help us think through their relationship and extends it to DevOps.

Closing the gap between confidence and knowledge

Part of our misbelief in things comes from the gap between our confidence and what we really know. Confronting that can prove exciting.

Negotiating an offer: An unreasonable number of reasonable requests

When you get a job offer, it needs to makes sense for you. When it doesn't, you need to know what requests you can make to change things.

What's a testing manager?

My career has been defined by a lack of test managers. Only 25% of my jobs have had them. That's led to a few interesting challenges.

Using ChatGPT to help write scripts

Each month I artisanally handcraft a newsletter for TestingConferences.org. A month ago I decided to see what parts of that process I could automate using ChatGPT

Testers are NOT the gatekeepers of quality

Software testers are NOT the gatekeepers of quality. They don’t control or limit access to quality software or services.

Hiring more Software Testers, an Analysis

I'm analyzing the next two Software Test Engineer hiring rounds from 2021. This time I have a theory to test: testing education is a positive signal in my hiring process.

Unit testing your e2e test framework

'Treat your test code like production code' is a really common saying. Lets tackle one facet of that rule: unit testing your e2e tests

Effective Technical Investigators

Testing is a skilled technical investigation and competent testers are the investigators. This essay is about re-introducing the concept of software testers as skilled technical investigators.

Feedback on Apprenticeships for Software Testers

An overview and feedback on an upcoming framework for helping companies create an apprenticeship program for software testers.

Answering questions with questions

There are two reasons why we shouldn't worry when someone answers our questions with more questions: most initial questions are sub optimal and follow on questions are important.

2022 In Review

Over the past decade I’ve written quite a few year end notes. They start with a brief summary and then focus on individual article performance. For reference see: 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 This year I want to try something different. Those previous notes are missing non-work

Hire someone with a Testing Education

Whenever possible, you should hire testers with testing certifications There are 2 big challenges when hiring for a role: 1. Getting enough applicants 2. Finding a match within those applicants Should a hiring manager focus on hiring testers with certifications over those without? No, they should not. First, it creates

My Career Story

Reflecting upon the past sets the context for the present. It also reveals a system of behaviors which can we improve upon once we understand them. In my mind this story is the foundation of that system.

What’s the right ratio of developers to testers?

What’s the right ratio of developers to testers? For as long as testers have been working with (other) developers, this question has existed. It’s a question focused on a false belief there is a right ratio in staffing levels across the industry. Ratios Ratios are relationships between two

Evidence in Performance Reviews

Reviews are grounded in evidence of your accomplishments, as measured against set goals.

Goodbye and Hello

Today I sent my last personal newsletter and then deleted my account. I called it Hello and Goodbye: Hello Friends, It's easily been 2 years since I've sent a newsletter to anyone on this mailing list. So long in fact you may not even remember having

Changing Wordpress' URL structure

This site has public articles dating back to March 2009. At some point in my blogging journey I moved to using WordPress as a platform and inherited a url structure with dates in it. I recently got rid of this structure and simplified it to be the name of the

What Is Exploratory Testing?

Exploratory testing was first coined by Cem Kaner who defined it as a style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the value of her work by treating test-related learning, test design, test execution, and test result interpretation as mutually

Exploratory Testing FAQs

I’ve come across a number of Frequently Asked Questions about Exploratory Testing and I’ve got what I hope are pretty good answers. Exploratory Testing FAQs Frequently Asked Questions about exploratory testing. Got a quick question? Get a quick answer. Yes, there are many examples where people have used

Exploratory Testing Charters

An exploratory testing charter is a mission statement for your testing. It helps provide structure and guidance so that you can focus your work and record what you find in a constructive way. How to Write an Exploratory Charter My favorite way to structure exploratory testing charters is to base

Self hosted blogs are not for the faint of heart

In December I wrote about hosting a WordPress blog on Digital Ocean and said: Blogging is an excuse to write more. Writing is a great way to think clearly about a subject. Running a website on a (small) Linux droplet is a starting point to learn more about the ops

Reflections and fun stats from 2021

I started my previous post by saying “2021 was an improvement over the previous year”. This was due, in large part, to the growth and new challenges at work. Here are some more reflections and a few fun stats from 2021 on those new challenges: Growth Growth at Promenade came

2021 in Review

2021 was an improvement over the previous year in a number of ways: more mental energy, more growth at work and a safe return to in-person conferences at the AST.  Growth and the challenges at work have become inspiration for sharing in short form on LinkedIn and Twitter. They’ve

The Future of Software Test Engineers and Codeless Tools

A few months ago I was chatting with Evgeny Kim about some of the reservations I had while exploring a new codeless test automation tool. He was also exploring some codeless tool options and so he invited me onto his podcast to talk about it. We chatted about a wide

Learning to balance a Maker's and Manager's Schedule

One of the hardest things thus far about becoming a manager (managing others and their work) has been learning to balance my maker’s schedule with my manager’s schedule. Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule The concept comes from a Paul Graham essay which says: There are two types of schedule,

THE Ultimate Curved Monitor for a MacBook Pro

Back when I wrote Building an Awesome Home Office I was six months into remote work and although optimistic about my chances of returning to the office, determined to use all the hardware I had at my disposal to make my home work conditions better. As time went on I

CAST 2021 Recap

When I hit publish on my article CAST 2021 is AFK a few weeks ago I said: I’m in an airplane for the first time in years on my way to Atlanta, GA for CAST 2021. CAST is both my first conference in-person and the Association for Software Testing’

Running Reflect.run builds in CodeFresh CI

For the last few months I’ve been using a no-code UI test automation service called Reflect.run to build out some UI tests (scenarios and such) with the goal of evaluating how well it works in in terms of feedback (and value) as part of our build process. While

CAST 2021 is AFK

I’m in an airplane for the first time in years on my way to Atlanta, GA for CAST 2021. CAST is both my first conference in-person and the Association for Software Testing’s first since 2019. I’m pretty excited to confer safely at an in person conference AND

Came for the training, stayed for the community

When I look back on my nearly decade journey in the testing community, it all started with the Association for Software Testing. I came to the AST seeking their BBST courses, but I stayed for the supportive community of people I met both online and afk. Once Upon a Time

Good Tests vs Bad Tests and why you shouldn't repeat them

A little rant on this concept of Good Tests vs Bad Tests and whether a good test (case) is a repeatable one.

Testing Community of Practice (CoP) Experience Report #1

I published an audio experience report about running my first Testing Community of Practice (CoP) at work. tl;dr it was a really good exercise that I intend to run regularly. Here’s an imperfect transcript: Hello everyone, Chris Kenst here, I wanted to talk about running my first community

Better Tester Training Materials

Last month the Association for Software Testing (AST) announced a new partnership with Altom, the owner of BBST®, that enables the AST to refresh our curriculum lineup with the new BBST® Community Track and help fund the future growth of the materials. This partnership and refresh are a huge milestone

Not good enough

A month ago someone on LinkedIn thanked a website and the person running it for helping them learn. They recommended others use the site. When people in my network commented on how the site wasn’t any good, I took notice. It reminded me of what Seth Godin said in

How to export environments from Postman

Postman can export data, including collections and environments, to be used outside of Postman. This is especially important when using Newman (their command-line collection runner). With the release of Postman v8.2 it is easier to find and export Postman collections but harder to find and export environments, hence this

Hiring a Software Tester, an Analysis

In May of 2020, back when Promenade Group was still called BloomNation, I opened a job posting for a Software Test Engineer. This was to be the first of many test positions we eventually hire for. After going through the whole process of hiring a software tester, I thought it

2020 in Review

2020 was a year of starts and stops. Of more time but less mental energy. It was a year of developing patience and adapting to hard changes. Patience In early March my wife, an ICU nurse here in Los Angeles, saw the first signs of COVID coming in from travelers

Hosting a Wordpress blog on Digital Ocean

I’ve been running Kenst.com since 2009. While the content has changed over time, the site has remained a blog. Kenst.com has gone from self-hosted on a Windows Home Server in my living room, to Blogger, and ultimately to WordPress. It’s been migrated to and from so

November 2020 Updates

Somehow Thanksgiving is over but I’ve been buying Christmas presents for weeks. It’s amazing how quickly (but not quietly) 2020 is flying by now that it is nearly December. As with most of my updates, these are mostly for my own clarity on what has transpired but I

I'm Speaking at TestFlix

It’s true, I’m speaking at TestFlix on November 28th, 2020. You should sign up to join; it’s free to register! I recorded and submitted my 7 minute talk on “Using Test Idea Catalogs for Better Testing”. The premise is: Testers can develop a set of tests or

Upgrading to WebDriverIO 6

In March I went through the process of upgrading to WebDriver v5. Last month I took the next step by upgrading our deployment to version 6 so we’d be current. I learned quite a bit from that first upgrade which made this upgrade a whole lot easier. Here’s

The TestOpsy

Back in January I hosted James Bach and Michael Bolton for an AST webinar on the concept of a TestOpsy or a way to learn about the testing you do by dissecting it. Below you’ll find not only a description and the webinar video but a transcription for what

Website Update? Don't forget to Annotate!

Let’s say you published new layout changes to your website or you released new content or even a new landing page. How do you easily record such events so you can see what happens to your traffic? If you are using Google Analytics you can add annotations! Simply put,

How to take a screenshot and record video in macOS

One of the nice things about macOS are the built-in tools. A recently improved upon built-in tool is called Screenshot which allows users to take a screenshot and record video. Taking screenshots has been around macOS forever, but taking video directly from OS shortcuts came along in macOS Mojave. The

Building an Awesome Home Office Space

My current awesome home space In the United States it seems like most of us will be working from home at least until Q1of 2021. I was thinking about this the other day: when will we see infection levels low enough that masks will no longer be required AND such

I’m running for the 2020-2022 AST Board of Directors

Elections just opened for the Association for Software Testing’s Board of Directors for which I’m a candidate. If you are a voting-eligible member of the AST I’d appreciate the consideration as I run for my 2nd term. For those who are voting (or possibly just interested) I

My First Term on the AST Board of Directors

The Association for Software Testing (AST), a non-profit professional organization dedicated to advancing the understanding and science of software testing, has announced a call for nominations for the Board of Directors for 2020-2022. This means my two-year term as a director is coming to an end. I feel fortunate and

FAQs to How I Became An Automation Engineer (talk)

I’ve given the talk on How I Became an Automation Engineer a few times. Each time I’ve gotten good feedback and a lot of questions from engaged participants. With each repeated question, I try to update my talk to address those points for future audiences. However often I

Five for Friday - April 17, 2020

Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth sharing. A few of these are “work” related but not all. Here is to helping find balance between working from home, home time and personal time: * I’m finishing my second week of One Hundred Push ups. It’s hard but fun

Upgrading to WebDriverIO 5

A few weeks ago I finished upgrading our implementation of WebDriverIO from version 4 to version 5. The impetus for the upgrade was an announcement by the WebDriverIO twitter account of a new beta version 6 to be quickly followed by a finished version (it’s already here). One thing

Regression testing isn’t only about repetition

Often when I’m chatting with someone about their regression testing strategy there is an assumption regression is all about repeating the same tests. This is a bit problematic because it ignores an important aspect which testers tend to be good at: focusing on risk. A better way to think

I like working from home... 🏠

I like working from home… but it feels different now.  Clarification: I like working from home, when it’s my choice. My ideal work/life choice would involve: splitting the week into 2 or 3 days of in-office and from-home work. The extrovert in me would get to talk to

Five for Friday - March 13, 2020

Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth exploring: * I’ve created a list of software testing conference changes this year due to COVID-19. It’s a small list that I think will grow over time. There have been a ton of canceled conferences because of Corona, mostly big events,

February 2020 Updates

This month has been busier than the last few and I’m feeling the need to chill. Part of this busyness is having just wrapped up teaching an AST-BBST Foundations class, which is about equally as intense for the instructors as they are for the students. The other part is

2019 in Review

My yearly tradition has been to summarize the most popular and important (to me) articles I’ve written over the past year along with some reflections and other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in. You can find previous years in review here: 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 What happened in

Five for Friday – January 17, 2020

Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth exploring: * The State of Testing Survey is open so go fill it out! I often like seeing what the results of this survey are and how things change over time. * The first newsletter of 2020 from TestingConferences.org came out and it’

January 2020 Updates

* Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 8th at 11am, I’m hosting James Bach and Michael Bolton for a webinar on TestOpsies – Dissecting Your Testing. Learn More or Sign up today to attend / receive the recording! * Starting on January 12th I’ll be teaching the first AST-BBST Foundations course of 2020. The class

It was the Creative Web that collapsed

In his book Permanent Record, Edward Snowden suggests the evolution of the internet has gone from a community without border or limit where “anonymity-through-polyonym produced more truth than falsehood” to one that is unrecognizable today. Unrecognizable, in part, due to the loss of individual websites shuttered by the promise of

What it means to be a leader in testing

Background: During CAST I sat for an interview with Pradeep Soundararajan of Moolya Testing. We talked about a few things mostly on what it meant to be a leader in the testing space. They made a short video on the interview so check it out or read the transcript. Transcript:

It's hard to attend and run a conference

Turns out it’s hard to attend and run a conference at the same time. Go. Figure. I had a great idea to let other people decide what talks I should attend at CAST 2019 and then I’d do a writeup of each one. While I love the idea

Five for Friday - September 20, 2019

Your head’s for having ideas, not for holding them. — David Allen I’m fairly certain I like writing because it clears my mind and gives me calm (aka I have ideas and then get too distracted when I hold them). Welcome to Friday, here are five points worth exploring:

Getting Paid to Learn

Picking up experience on the job can be great (for example learning about SEO, application monitoring or observability) but all things being equal, it shouldn’t come at the expense of the many other ways we learn. Without the support to continuously learn new things we get stuck in jobs

Late-August updates

August has been crazy busy with a mixture of travel, AST elections, my day job and the annual CAST conference. Some recent updates: Learning * Joined my first TestAutomationU course on WebDriverIO. I already use WebDriverIO v4 but figured since it was using v5 it might be fun to see what

Help me choose my CAST 2019 schedule

I’ll be attending CAST in Cocoa Beach, FL next week and I can’t quite decide what sessions and workshops I want to attend on during the conference days (Wednesday and Thursday). I will definitely live tweet but I’d also like to do some live blogging / recaps / summaries

Five for Friday - July 26, 2019

I have now managed to keep my publishing trend of 4 weeks straight with this post! Here are five links worth exploring: * I recently finished reading (technically I listened to the audiobook) Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. It was a really fascinating book

You don't have to be an expert to teach

You don’t have to be an expert to teach someone else, you just need to know a little more than they do. Years ago when I became an assistant scuba instructor, I was able to provide huge value to new students despite my having far less diving experience than

Do things that don’t scale

If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. – Paul Graham With the title of Automation Engineer it might seem like automating bottlenecks is “my

How I Became An Automation Engineer

Have you ever wondered what an Automation Engineer is or what they do? I’ve never found a great definition so I shared my experiences on How I Became an Automation Engineer and what that first year has looked like: the good, bad and the ok. I also talked a

Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester

Have you ever wondered what a code review is and/or what it’s like to participate in one? Are you a tester, product or business person who regularly interacts with the output of the code but wonders if they could catch bugs earlier by “shifting left”? Turns out you

Move fast and make things better

I much prefer the saying move fast and make things better over move fast and break things. The latter might be more popular but the former is more realistic. Moving fast (software agility) used to be a business advantage but now, at least for any service business, it’s mostly

Five for Friday - May 24, 2019

As much as I like writing recap blog posts I’m tired of the way I title them, e.g. early, mid, late + month updates so instead I’ve organized this one as five articles / resources to share (note some of these feature me): * My Webinar for TestCraft on “Participating

Join my Webinar on Participating in Code Reviews as Tester

Last year I wrote an article for Stickyminds about Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester where I made the case for Code Reviews being more than just a chance to catch bugs. They also serve as a chance to see how something is built and have a conversation about

late-April Updates

April has come and is nearly gone without any prose being published. I couldn’t have that. You see I’ve been writing but I haven’t condensed that prose into a nice enough package to share. In the meantime lots of things are happening that are worthy of sharing:

How to debug problems on Mobile Safari

When you are developing and/or testing a web app on iOS, having the ability to inspect and understand what is happening in the browser is incredibly useful. For just this reason Mobile Safari can use the same developer tools that are built into Safari on macOS. To start debugging

It’s easier to write about tooling

It’s easier to write about tooling than it is to write about the decisions we took and models we made prior to choosing it. I can write about a specific test I designed with WebDriverIO far easier than I can write about the strategy taken, oracles used or even

Installing ChromeDriver on Windows

Installing on Windows 7 & 10: The following are the best ways to install ChromeDriver on Windows so you can run Selenium: * The easiest way to install ChromeDriver is to use a package manager such as Chocolatey. You should really have a package manager if you don’t now: 1.

Five for Friday - February 1, 2019

I don’t imagine doing a Five for Friday often (this is in fact the first time I’ve done one) but it seems like a good format for a few important things happening this month: 1. February 21st at 11am, I’m hosting Brent Jensen for an AST webinar

Quality Equals Profit – Understanding Quality Helps Us Test

A coworker sent me an email about a conversation he had with one of our executives about risk and how quality played into her decision making: “She [the executive] was giving me some insight… As we were discussing the balance of quality policies (as we experienced them in the beta

2018 In Review

As it has become a yearly tradition I will attempt to summarize the most popular and important articles I’ve written over the year along with some other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in with past reflections. You can find previous years here: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 What happened in

The Woolsey Fire came too close

Today, when you approach Calabasas from either direction on HWY 101 the first thing you notice are the black rolling hills. As far as the eye can see there are visible signs of the struggle that came with the Woolsey fire. Lucky for us changing winds and a strong first

Remember remember it's the month of November

November has been so packed full of interesting events that it’s time for an update! (Although perhaps not as interesting as Guy Fawkes Night, on November 5th). The first weekend of November I took my position as incoming Treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Association for Software

BBST Domain Testing – An Experience Report

In late January of 2014, after the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST) at Florida Institute of Technology, Dr. Cem Kaner and Dr. Rebecca Fiedler put together a 5-day pilot course to beta test a new Black Box Software Testing (BBST) course called Domain Testing. I was one of ten

How To Run Your Selenium Tests with Headless Chrome

The Problem If you want to run your tests headlessly on a Continuous Integration (CI) server you’ll quickly realize that you can’t with an out-of-the-box setup since there is no display output for the browser to launch in. You could use a third party library like Xvfb (tip

Appropriate Test Documentation & Formatting

The Question Recently in an online forum a tester person asked: Does someone have a simple example of test case (excel sheet) format? I am the only one tester in my company and we are trying to arrange the test documentation. Any advice or example will be useful. I wish

How To Run Your Selenium Tests Headlessly in Docker

The Old Way It used to be that in order to get your Selenium tests running on a given machine you had to install each individual browser and then the browser drivers (for instance ChromeDriver for Chrome). Some of my most popular posts are about installing these drivers. However that’

Highlights from CAST 2018

Last week I attended CAST in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which was my second time attending and the first since CAST in Grand Rapids back in 2015. It was a fun experience for a number of reasons including giving my first workshop at CAST and being elected to the AST Board

I'm running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors

I’m running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors this year. I’m asking for your Vote! (If you are an AST member you’ll see an email for voting on August 6th!) If my name sounds familiar to you it could be because I ran and failed to

8 Tools I use to Accelerate My Testing

Inspired by Justin Rorhman’s post of a similar name with a slight twist focusing on tools that generally help accelerate my testing. As a test and quality specialist embedded in an engineering team I have a lot of work to do on any given day. Our engineering team’s

Good and Bad UI Test Automation explained - Inspired by Richard Bradshaw's Tweets

Generally speaking there’s a scary trend with the influx of people interested in test automation where (seemingly) everyone wants to automate at the UI level. For example the phrase “Test automation” seems to be synonymous with UI automation which seems to mean using Selenium. To be fair there are

Opting out of A/B Tests while Running your Automated Tests

At Laurel & Wolf, we extensively introduce & test new features as part of A/B or split testing. Basically we can split traffic coming to a particular page into different groups and then show those groups different variations of a page or object to see if those changes lead

late-May Updates

Some random thoughts and updates towards the end of May: * On August 8th, Dwayne Green and I are teaching a workshop at the Conference for the Association for Software Testing on Domain Testing (aka Boundary Analysis + Equivalence Class Partioning). Will you be there? If so come to our quick workshop

What are Quicktests and when are they used?

What are Quicktests? Tests that don’t cost much to design, are based on some estimated idea for how the system could fail (risk-based) and don’t take much prior knowledge in order to apply are often called quicktests (sometimes stylized as quick tests or even called attacks). When are